Movie Review: Immortals

When you read ‘From the Producers of (X)’, it’s almost always a trick to get you to the cinema and see the movie. They want to make you think it is from the same creators, a.k.a. directors/writers, but it’s not. It’s the same producers. The only thing producers produce, is the money needed to make the film. They put the people together whom will make the film.

When Immortals started advertising about being by the same producers of ‘300’, I started suspecting this movie sucked. The director, Tarsem Singh (and not 300’s Zack Snyder) had only two previous films on his curriculum vitae. Those where ‘The Cell’, a weird movie which featured Jennifer Lopez. The other was a movie I hadn’t even heard of (and that’s rare).

The cast was rather convincing. Henry Cavill (Man of Steel, The Tudors) plays Theseus. Theseus is chosen by the gods to defeat the evil king Hyperion (Mickey Rourke), and is helped by Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionare, Rise of the Planet of the Apes). Zeus is played by both John Hurt (1984) and Luke Evans, the lather having previously played Apollo in the film ‘Clash of the Titans’.

If you think Immortals follows the story of Theseus, you’re partly right. The story follows Theseus, but not the Greek version. The writes took the story of Theseus, ripped it open, pulled out almost everything, put in random parts of Greek mythologie, sowed it back together and gave it a good shake. The story has nothing to do with the original Theseus anymore, but it does make a reasonably good story. Greek mythology is hard to fuck up.

Once I had let go of the original story of Theseus (at first I was like; that’s not what happened!), I could enjoy the movie better. Tarsem Singh tries to mimic some of Zack Snyder’s ‘300’ shots, but doesn’t get the same effect as Snyder had when 300 came out. Too many movies have tried and they have numbed down my enthousiasm about blood flying around.

The movie wasn’t bad. It was actually quite good.

They should stop hiding behind another movie, because that will create expectations which’ll be hard to fullfill. Let the movie speak for itself, if your trailer is good, people will come. Even though I didn’t see the movie in the cinema; 11-11-11 was the day Skyrim was released.